


cages with see-through walls

by blasphemyincarnate



Series: tumblr fic request [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, The Cage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 19:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21883462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blasphemyincarnate/pseuds/blasphemyincarnate
Summary: Michael gets to be the last one standing.
Relationships: Michael/Adam Milligan
Series: tumblr fic request [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1572946
Comments: 18
Kudos: 78





	cages with see-through walls

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "this isn’t necessarily shippy & also kinda canon divergent, as of 15.08; while michael’s in the cage, he can feel when other angels die n shit?? and he could feel when the other archangels were killed, when the angels were cast out of heaven, etc, and that fucked him up pretty badly ??" via [bitteradamgirl](https://bitteradamgirl.tumblr.com)

They’ve barely been in the Cage nineteen years when it first happens.

Adam and Michael had been sitting across from each other, leaning on opposite walls in the tiny storage closet their space has transformed into. Their silence is punctuated by Sam’s screams and Lucifer’s cackles and-

Adam thought about the girlfriend he had in high school who had an obsession with all things mythology and how she knew so much about Lucifer. He wondered what she would think about his current situation.

That’s what he’d been thinking about, and he’d been in the middle of, _-wow if only we could trade places right now, she’d be so fucking into this, probably wouldn’t even notice the helliness of this hell-_ when Michael’s head snaps up, eyes bright and burning and blue.

Adam wouldn’t have thought anything of it, if the noise from outside hadn’t stopped abruptly as well. Lucifer wasn’t laughing and Sam wasn’t- wasn’t screaming.

“Michael?” Adam chanced, in a whisper. He cleared his throat. God, some water would be nice right now.

The archangel didn’t respond, just stood there with his head cocked to the side ever-so-slightly and a confused, pained expression on his face.

“Michael,” Adam said again. “Is something… is something wrong?”

_Maybe we’re getting out of here. No, don’t think about that. Think about, think about Amelie and how much she would’ve loved meeting Lucifer-_

Michael stood there, just stood there, for a few minutes. Then he leaned back against the wall and slid down it in a decidedly un-archangelic way. 

“No,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

Michael was still wearing Adam’s face. The same face Adam had looked into for nineteen years. He knew his own face better than the back of his hand.

Everything was not fine.

–

They don’t talk about it for years. Years and years and years and years and-

-Sam’s gone, why, that’s so fucking unfair-

-years and years and years and-

-he’s doing it again.

Michael is sitting next to Adam with one golden-white wing wrapped gently around the human’s shoulders, when the wing disappears and he practically hurls himself to his feet.

“Michael,” Adam said again. He’s half-asleep and not completely sure what just happened, but something has. Like, like that time. That time, how long ago? Hundreds of hundreds of years.

A long time ago.

Michael starts, he starts making _noises_. Noises Adam’s not sure an angel should be able to make. He’s crying and screaming and yet somehow so quiet. 

Adam whispers his name and stands up, moving slowly. Michael’s not facing him and the movement doesn’t appear threatening either way, but he does anyways. 

Adam puts a hand on the archangel’s shoulder and they both pretend Michael doesn’t flinch.

“What’s wrong?”

Michael doesn’t say anything for the longest time. Maybe a whole year. At some point, silences that last years begins to feel like hours.

Sometimes Adam isn’t sure if they’ve been in hell 20,000 years or two weeks.

“Michael, please,” Adam says. “Talk to me.”

He does.

He tells Adam about how that first time so long ago, he’d felt his sister die. Raphael. After Lucifer fell and Gabriel disappeared, the only sibling he’d had. 

“She was the only one in my family who was always there,” he whispers in the darkness. Adam holds him a little tighter.

He tells Adam about how he’d felt her fear, her panic, her confusion. That terrible feeling of “something’s wrong” and realizing what it is a moment before it’s too late.

He tells Adam about how her pain had rocketed through his body, how it was all there for just an instant before- nothing.

Before she was gone.

“And just now,” Michael says. He turns to Adam with shattered eyes. “Just now, Heaven fell. Do you know what it’s like, to feel each of your brethren fall from the sky? How their burning wings feel like on your own back? How do you live with the knowledge that their screams will be trapped in your ears forever?”

Adam doesn’t know quite how to respond to that, so he doesn’t. He falls asleep with one of the universe’s deadliest creatures tangled in his arms.

–

Another thousand years pass. Two thousand. Three thousand. Adam stops counting around year eighty thousand two hundred and six.

Michael stumbles back into their room one day - which, for the record, looks the same as it did eighty thousand two hundred and six years ago - with a wild look in his eye.

“Adam,” he says. “Adam, something is wrong. I think-”

He practically collapses on the ground then, fingers digging into the glass debris. A small cut forms on the side of his palm, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Of course he doesn’t. He’s an archangel.

Adam reaches for him, gathers up the broken pieces of the archangel he has, crazily, chosen to love. “What is it?”

Michael stares at him with the same shattered eyes he gets when he thinks too hard about Raphael or the other angels or his father. “I think Gabriel’s dead.”

Adam genuinely doesn’t know what to think. He’d thought Gabriel was already dead, but it’s clearly not the case.

“I thought- sorry, it’s insensitive.” He almost says it out loud. 

“Go ahead,” Michael says dully. “It’s fine.”

“I thought he was already dead.”

The angel shrugs. “I’d heard so, but then, after I felt Raphael- Raphael die, I began to suspect. And now,” he shudders, a full body-shake, “now I know.”

“Tell me about him,” Adam says.

Michael smiles, weakly, and tells Adam how Gabriel had the brightest Grace Michael had seen at the time. “Oh, Lucifer was the Morningstar, and he shone so bright, but when Gabriel was first created- all was golden.”

He tells him about how Gabriel didn’t have a preferred pronoun or a preferred vessel like the rest of the archangels. “The first time she went to Earth - she was she, then - she came skipping back into Heaven and said, ‘I made my own vessel, so I don’t have to use humans. It’s got snappy fingers and everything.’”

He talks and talks and Adam thinks about how he’d heard Gabriel had always been Lucifer’s favorite, and he thinks about that time Michael told him about how Gabriel roped Raphael into her first ever prank, and thinks that being the baby of the family made Gabriel everyone’s favorite.

He wonders why that doesn’t hold true for him.

“They sound wonderful,” he tells Michael instead of what he’s thinking.

Michael smiles bitterly. “They were.”

–

One day, Adam gathers some particularly big and nice pieces of broken glass he finds and places them on a piece of his shirt that came off maybe two hundred years ago. He gathers some smaller, shinier pieces he finds and puts them in a pile between the two.

“It’s not much,” he tells Michael. “But it’s something. A memorial. If you will.”

Michael smiles wistfully and finds a piece of burned glass on the ground that he puts beneath the other pieces. “Lucifer died this morning,” he tells Adam. Almost emotionless, except he’d been gone for almost forty days earlier, and he only ever does that when something bad happens upstairs.

“Guess you’re the last one standing,” Adam says. He stopped wondering if these types of comments were insensitive twenty years ago.

Michael smiles and his voice almost doesn’t shake. “Guess I am.”

**Author's Note:**

> [scream with me on tumblr](https://incorrect-waywardangels.tumblr.com)


End file.
